The dangers of information sharing.

AuthorMunro, Eileen

Abstract

Both the New Zealand and British governments want to improve children's welfare and are seeking ways of improving preventative and early intervention services. This article critiques the policy being implemented in England with a particular focus on the role given to professionals collecting and sharing information about families as a means of screening children and deciding which ones to target. It is argued that this policy undermines parents and overestimates professionals' ability to predict future outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

Good information sharing is the key to successful collaborative working and early intervention to help children and young people at risk of poor outcomes. (DfES 2006:1)

The belief that more data or information automatically leads to better decisions is probably one of the most unfortunate mistakes of the information society. (Woods and Hollnagel 2006)

These two conflicting views on the value of sharing information, the first by the UK department responsible for children's services in England (2) and the second by two eminent researchers in cognitive systems engineering, illustrate an important and highly topical debate. Governments in both the United Kingdom and New Zealand have the excellent ambition of improving the welfare and safety of their children and both are considering how to provide more timely and effective services to families. This article reviews the UK government's policy "Every Child Matters" (HM Treasury 2003) and, in particular, the central role it ascribes to increased information gathering and sharing by professionals as the way to decide which families need additional help (for full details of all the proposed and actual databases, see FIPR 2006). Developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have transformed our ability to record, analyse and transmit data. It is now technically possible to collect comprehensive data on all children within a country and for that data to be dispersed around the various departments and agencies that have some role in children's lives. However, although it is possible, we need to ask whether it is the right thing to do, "right" in both its practical and ethical meanings.

The proposals on the use of ICT are not just small, innocuous, administrative changes in services but are a central part of a new approach to working with families. The UK policy of "Every Child Matters" entails a transformation of the relationship between the State and families. The policy sets out the government's targets and performance indicators for children's development; it ascribes responsibility for achieving the targets not to parents but to professionals working in children's services; and it sets out a scheme for monitoring, screening, and intervening in the lives of children in order to improve attainment of the targets. While the underlying motivation contains a strong and genuine concern for children's welfare, this is tempered by a definition of welfare that is linked to the needs of the State and a failure to acknowledge that the concept itself is contested; children and parents do not always agree with politicians or professionals on what is best for a particular child at a particular point in their lives, nor is there universal consensus on what a "good" adult looks like. Even within professional groups, there is a lack of consensus: social workers in a Scottish study failed to agree on the significance of a child's attachment to a carer or whether harm arose from physical neglect alone (Daniel 1999).

This article takes the subdued view of the value of data sharing captured in the second quote. While there is evidence that professional sharing of information is necessary to uncover concealed cases of abuse and neglect, there is no empirical evidence to support the claim that extensive cross-sectoral data sharing is required to identify other problems experienced by children and parents (Brown and White 2006:3). It will be argued that the proposed network of professional data sharing in the UK is not a significant part of the solution for improving children's welfare and, indeed, may have unanticipated adverse effects. An alternative approach in situations not involving child safety issues is to continue to place parents at the heart of decision-making about children's needs and to focus more on listening to parents and children than on monitoring and making professional judgements about them. The article will draw on the debates and the experiences in England, where the policy is being implemented to bring out the arguments for and against the role of data sharing.

WHAT PROBLEMS ARE WE TRYING TO SOLVE?

Before judging the merits of a proposal or policy we need to be clear about what problems it is intended to help to solve. In both countries, the ambitions for children's welfare are high. In the UK, the government wants "to ensure every child has the chance to fulfil their potential" (The Treasury 2003:6).

Societies' concern for children's welfare has often had a dual motivation of altruism and self-interest (Parton 2006). In the UK, altruism is certainly a motivating force but the urgency of the issue is strengthened by the economic needs arising from the increasingly competitive global market and demographic changes:

We all stand to share the benefits of an economy and society with less educational failure, higher skills, less crime, and better health. (The Treasury 2003:5) The link between children's outcomes and economic factors is also recognised by New Zealand's Children's Commissioner:

An ageing population structure, with increasing economic dependency and caregiver ratios, means that the future productivity of every child and young person is important. (Children's Commissioner 2006) Within the overall aim of all children fulfilling their potential, the UK government has identified priority aims:

To reduce the numbers of children who experience educational failure, engage in offending or anti-social behaviour, suffer from ill health, or become teenage parents. (The Treasury 2003:5) Although the policy change was introduced to the public as a response to the report into the tragic death of Victoria Climbie, a child abused, neglected, and then killed by her great-aunt and partner (Laming 2003), it has a longer genealogy, stemming from New Labour deliberations in the 1990s about improving education and reducing delinquency (Parton 2006). Its origins within the criminal justice system are apparent in its emphasis on policing children's behaviour and developmental progress; the original version of the electronic system was called "Identification, Referral and Tracking" (IRT) which has strong associations with criminal investigations.

Before looking at the contribution that more intensive data collecting and sharing could have in achieving these aims, it is helpful to analyse further the key elements in implementing the policy. Firstly, we need to be able to identify who needs help. Secondly, professionals need the knowledge and skills to offer help that puts the children on a more beneficial developmental path. Thirdly, they need the resources to provide that help. All three elements present difficulties but what contribution, if any, can data sharing make?

WHO NEEDS HELP?

A key aim in the new English policy is to increase preventative and early intervention services. This has compelling arguments in its favour: it could reduce the amount of distress and harm experienced by children; it is likely to be easier to solve problems when they are at an early stage; it might lead to more effective solutions that reduce the number of children who enter adulthood with significant problems that are costly to society, i.e. of becoming what Feinstein and Sabates (2006:1) have termed "high-cost, high-harm adults".

Preventative services can operate at different points in the aetiology (causation) of a social problem. Primary prevention seeks to ameliorate the conditions that create the problem in the first place. Secondary prevention aims to respond quickly when low level problems arise and prevent them getting worse. Tertiary prevention involves responding when the problem has become serious.

With social and psychological problems, as with health, the ideal is to have a successful primary prevention policy that eliminates the problem. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC) provides an internationally agreed set of basic needs of children. Both New Zealand and the UK have seen...

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